If they aren’t going to charge for access otherwise then I don’t think being ad supported is such a bad thing. Much more honest than subscription pricing and ads in my opinion.

Whats crazy is Hangouts is still going (in the form of Chat and Meet). I’ve had the same group chat going with a few buddies on it for years and years now. And it is still better than anything outside of Signal in my opinion for messaging.

Dunno how it is Apples fault that he didn’t take the time to understand how the tools that he uses work.

If I plow my car into a crowd of people because I mistake the gas for the brake that is not GM’s fault.

I mean Android, and Samsung in particular, borrow from Apple all the time as well. Hell Samsung frequently bad mouths Apples for the anti-consumer choices one year then follows suit and does the same thing in a year or 2 themselves.

These kinds of takes are not the flex some seem to think they are in my opinion.

I wonder how long it will be before they start giving discounts on tickets for interacting with the ads a certain number of times during the flight.

The most damning thing to call it is “inaccurate”. Nothing will drive the average person away from a companies information gathering products faster than associating it with being inaccurate more times than not. That is why they are inventing different things to call it. It sounds less bad to say “my LLM hallucinates sometimes” than it does to say “my LLM is inaccurate sometimes“.

Then it sounds like the “web” tab should be the default and the AI Overview should be the optional tab the user has to choose to go click on.

If you have to constantly manually intervene in what your automated solutions are doing, then it is probably not doing a very good job and it might be a good idea to go back to the drawing board.

Disclaimer: The below rant does not include things like healthcare where choice in the market is either not a thing or not possible. Lest someone think I am being absolutist. It is purely railing against the average consumer widget, not grandmas oxygen tank refills.

That depends on how many people want them.

Companies will make, or stop making/doing, nearly anything if the money for doing it goes away. But not enough people want “dumbphones” bad enough to stop buying “smartphones”.

Just like not enough people want small phones to stop buying the big ones. Or not enough people want the price of Netflix to go down to stop paying for Netflix, etc. Consumers in general need to learn the power of and build up the mental discipline to do without when the available options aren’t what they want. Apple, Google, etc can’t force you to buy it from them after all.

Companies prey on the inability of the consumer to go without when they find the terms of the deal distasteful to great success. Large chunks of every companies marketing department think about nothing else.

The real “sin” in all of this is there not being enough smaller players around to fill those smaller segments, because we kept buying from the company that bought up all of the competition years ago despite finding those practices distasteful.

Companies, and politicians, have figured out that the average majority is all bark and no bite. And the average majority would be wise to start to figure that out.

Good thing seeing that a game is published or developed by EA, or one of its subsidiaries, is 9 times out of 10 enough for me to not bother with the game to begin with. They don’t make a thing that is worth dealing with them to get to play.

That company burned all of its good will and trust with me years ago. So sure go ahead and put as many ads as you want EA. I know for sure I won’t be seeing them.

As much as some of us may dislike it when a company does these kinds of things. You can’t really blame them for following the laws of the country that they are headquartered in.

You can blame them for operating there to begin with in cases like Apple in China, but you could hardly blame them for following the laws of the US where they are headquartered for example.

If the law of the land where the headquarters is requires them to give up the data they do have to partner nations then they don’t really have much choice in the long run if they want to continue to exist.

Something I have been thinking a lot about lately when it comes to Googles products, especially the Chromecast since they started shoving it so full of ads with their Google TV launcher.

Most of the flexibility I like about Android TV over say tvOS is that it allows me to customize things like the launcher or use SmartTube over the official YouTube app. The thing is the only time I care to do such things is to get away from the mess Google made of the product or service, usually with ads, to begin with.

So it becomes this circle of I prefer it only because it lets me undo things that it pushed upon me that its competition doesn’t in the first place.

Long winded way of saying I’m not real sure what Google could do with the new model that would make it compelling to me beyond a bottom of the barrel product for a guest room or something, and even then the Onn 4k is cheaper and more or less the same experience, over just replacing it with an Apple TV when the time comes.

Never worked for one of the big tech firms, but I have been in the working world for ~16 years and one of the few things anyone that has been around for awhile can and will agree on is you don’t talk about salary within earshot of the boss, you don’t badmouth company decisions within earshot of the boss, you don’t talk about politically charged topics, and you certainly don’t combine 2 of those 3 and protest company decisions on politically charged issues literally in the office.

You also don’t do those things on company provided equipment, software, or services. If you want to bitch about something the company is doing, you go out to lunch or do it after hours, preferably without written or video evidence.

While I think it is gross that Google fired them for this, given the history of the company almost encouraging such things, I can say these people just got a hard lesson that most of us learn about the corporate world long before we make it to working for the likes of Google.

Rightly or wrongly freedom of speech, assembly, etc protects you from the Government, not your boss. And your boss is a petty little ego maniac that controls your livelihood, so best to stay out of his gaze on matters you know he/she would view negatively where at all possible.

As much as I like Linux, and use it almost exclusively on desktop/laptop, every time I see something like this I am reminded how much I hate the fact that Apple of all companies is about the last bastion of commercial and consumer operating systems who isn’t trying to derive the bulk of their revenue from advertising.

Because that gives the user as much or more control over the device as Apple themselves have. One of the fairly consistent things about Apple over the years has been a desire to maintain tight control for themselves over the products they make.

Shhh, don’t tell the out of touch politicians that teenagers are not exactly known for their care about if something is against the rules or not.

It is more fun to watch them be shocked on TV when they can’t explain why their ideas don’t work.

It seems like so long that Roku was not a horrible company. Simple little box for a good price with a small static ad on the home screen to make money.

Seems like a lifetime ago.

I hate it, but I tend to agree with your take. If you don’t want someone to be able to find out about it, don’t do it on the internet.

The fact that there is basically no good “premium” options for smart devices, just cheap adware trash or more diy type stuff with home assistant and the like, tells me there is not much of a mainstream market for most of these devices to begin with. If your only niche is just the hobby crowd or shit that has to be so cheap that you can’t make a profit without riddling it with ads then it might not be a market worth getting into.

People need to stop holding Jobs up as some deity of tech. He was a marketing and hype man that was in the right place at the right time and knew how to take advantage of that luck. Nothing more, nothing less. It is equally possible his leadership style would have squandered the opportunities Apple has had since his death had it been him and not Cook in charge.

By any metric other than “line must always go up” Apple is doing just fine.

“Oh no, they haven’t found another multi hundred billion dollar product to release since the iPhone, even though there are no signs that the iPhone won’t continue to be a very profitable business for years and years to come…better go dig up Steve jobs, shove a stick up his back, magic his corpse back to life, and beg him to save the shareholders profit margins”, the horror.